Tease us once, shame on us. Tease us twice, shame on you Gaben. Tease us thrice ...

If you haven't spotted it yet, prepare to have your hopes dashed once again for there is a new Half-Life ... patch. Yes, the original game, which is old enough to drink in all of Canada, just received some patches to fix gameplay bugs and save issues. To add salt to the wound, most who want to revist the original will do so with Black Mesa which uses the updated Source engine. Considering that the original Half-Life was done on the Goldsource engine, it is hard to lend credence to the theories that this is in preparation for a launch of the third chapter of Gordon Freeman's really long and bad day. If you wish to torment yourself you can drop by The Inquirer for a link to the comment thread under the patch notes on Steam.

"LEGENDARY GAME Half-Life has just got an update, but naturally, users are not entirely satisfied and many would have preferred Half-Life 3 apparently. Valve announced the update on the Steam Blog and it is in the comments that the calls for the third version of the game come to life. We will come back to that though"

What if Half-Life 3 is buried in the Xen levels for Black Mesa, a la, Frog Fractions 2? X is the 3rd from the last letter in the alphabet, and there are 3 letters in Xen! I think I'm on to something here.